Style combination · Pairs well
Atelier Populaire × ROSTA Windows
Like the ROSTA windows, each sheet answers the day's news by hand with a stark figure and a caption; run single posters as a numbered sequence when one image cannot tell the whole story.
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) ROSTA Windows
- Type from Atelier Populaire
- Colour from Atelier Populaire
- Form from ROSTA Windows
- Composition from ROSTA Windows
- Surface from Atelier Populaire
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Atelier Populaire
Wake
Permanent Marker; Atelier Populaire used Brushed letters, left open on the silk while gum arabic is painted around them to block the screen, so the edges stay ragged and uneven and Wall-slogan handwriting of May '68, lifted from graffiti and marches
Text · ROSTA Windows
Hand-stencilled satirical news posters made by the Russian Telegraph Agency during the Civil War and hung in empty shop windows, first in Moscow, then in Petrograd and provincial towns. Mikhail Cheremnykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Dmitry Moor and others turned the day's news into numbered sequences of crude, flat stock figures in two or three colours, each frame with a short rhymed caption, reviving the lubok as Futurist street agitation.
Archivo; ROSTA Windows used Hand-lettered Cyrillic captions in brush and pen, one under each frame and Blocky hand-drawn Cyrillic capitals for headings and frame numbers
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Atelier Populaire, with a counter-accent from ROSTA Windows. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) ROSTA Windows
-
#f2eee3ground · 39% -
#141414ink · 15% -
#cf2027accent · 20% -
#23408eaccent · 15% -
#c99a3baccent · 11%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f2eee3;
--ink: #141414;
--accent-1: #cf2027;
--accent-2: #23408e;
--accent-3: #c99a3b;
--font-display: "Permanent Marker", cursive;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster): The posters were made anonymously and given away, and some equate the police or de Gaulle with the Nazis (the SS on a riot policeman's shield, popularly 'CRS SS'; Hitler holding a de Gaulle mask); do not attribute them to individual designers, sell pastiches as May '68 originals, or aim those Nazi comparisons at real people today without that history in view. 'Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands' answered antisemitic attacks on Cohn-Bendit's origins (the far-right press smeared him as a Marxist German Jew, and Georges Marchais wrote in L'Humanité of 'the German anarchist'); do not reuse it, or the 'indésirables' poster, as a generic 'we are all X' template without that history.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Atelier Populaire
- South African Resistance Poster Pairs well · Both chose hand-made silkscreen because it was cheap, quick and teachable to non-artists; borrow the struggle posters' organisation emblems and second ink when a campaign must stay recognisable beyond one day's slogan.
- Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC) Contrasts · Same decade, opposite means: ICAIC's silkscreened film posters and OSPAAAL's mostly offset solidarity posters were polished, many-coloured and made to last, while the Atelier's one anonymous ink was pulled overnight for the next morning's wall; decide which of the two the brief needs.
- Polish Poster School Contrasts · Polish posters are signed painterly metaphors by named authors, while the Atelier stripped away signature and painterly finish; a recognisable individual hand breaks its collective voice.
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · The House of European History traces a line from these posters to Jamie Reid's Sex Pistols graphics; set one brushed slogan in a single ink against xerox cut-up for a flyer with the same anti-authority bite.
- See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints Contrasts · Both are collective, unsigned screenprints, but May '68 shouts one emblem and a strike slogan, while See Red tells a small domestic story with a wry caption.
- Grapus (French Militant Graphic Collective) Contrasts · The founders came out of the 1968 workshops, but the Beaux-Arts atelier pulled one flat ink, one brushed silhouette and a slogan in rough capitals; Grapus layers photographs, paint and coloured handwriting, mostly on white. Use the first for overnight urgency, Grapus for a warmer, longer campaign.
- ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics Contrasts · Both answered a crisis with overnight slogans on the street, but the May '68 posters were brushed by hand and pulled in one ink, while most ACT UP and Gran Fury posters were professionally printed in offset and modelled on advertising; choose rough urgency or seductive polish before mixing them.
- Ultras Graphics (Curva Banners and Tifo) Pairs well · The type designer Alessio D'Ellena, quoted by Vice, places ultras' vernacular letters 'more in the tradition of' the Atelier Populaire's anonymous May '68 posters; borrow their single brushed slogan and anonymous signature for a banner with something to say.
With ROSTA Windows
- Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Contrasts · The heroic, naturalistic painting that displaced it in the 1930s is the exact opposite of its crude, satirical shorthand.
- Lubok Popular Print Pairs well · Its folk ancestor: keep the lubok's numbered episodes and rhymed verses, but flatten the hand-coloured woodcut into stencilled silhouettes for speed.
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Shares the cheap, fast, many-copies ethos; stencil-and-sequence storytelling translates directly into zines and photocopied flyers.
- Russian Constructivism Contrasts · The rival revolutionary language of the same years: photomontage, set grotesques and diagonals against hand-stencilled cartoon frames; pick one register per message.
- Escuela Bruguera (Spanish Humour Comics) Contrasts · Both tell satire in sequences of crude, flat-colour stock figures with hand lettering; ROSTA hand-stencilled numbered news frames with rhymed captions for shop windows as open agitation, while Bruguera printed balloon gags in children's weeklies that end on a blow and keep the satire under the fun.
- Kinshasa Popular Painting Pairs well · Both are hand-painted satire with words in the picture for a street audience; borrow ROSTA's panel sequence to break a Kinshasa-style scene and caption into a strip.
- Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) Contrasts · Both turn the day's political news into hand-lettered satirical drawings for a mass audience. ROSTA stencilled numbered frames as agitation for the new state; the Turkish weeklies caricatured whoever held power, from Özal to Erdoğan, and were banned or sued for it.
- Dazibao (Big-Character Posters) Pairs well · Both are improvised agitational wall media made faster than print allows; pair their urgency for time-critical campaigns.